Cultivating organizational creativity in an age of complexity - the IBM Institute of Business Value Report 2011

"Why are some organizations consistently good at innovating and adapting while others seem to be blindsided by change? Is it because of their disciplined innovation process or the knowledge and skills of their people? Or is it their determination to build a culture where challenging assumptions is not only encouraged, but expected? Our IBM Creative Leadership Study found that leaders who embrace the dynamic tension between creative disruption and operational efficiency can create new models of extraordinary value."

To download and read the full report click here

What is Green Beret Leadership? - David Belden, The Professional Outsider

I am sick of hearing about the new normal. I reject the idea thatcompanies need to do more with less. These are both ludicrous clichés that provide easy excuses for doing nothing or clinging to the past…a past that is more myth than reality. The vast majority of the companies I work with are doing well. They are successful because they are doing things differently, and having fun making the changes. For the past 12 years, I have had the great privilege of working with some of the most adaptable and progressive companies in the country. As a Vistage Chair (www.vistage.com), I facilitate monthly meetings of 16 CEOs/Presidents/Business Owners/Managing Partners in a peer-group think tank setting. I also meet with each of them individually for a dialogue beginning with some variation of the question “What’s the most important thing we should talk about today?”

Click to read more ...

Preparing your organization for growth - McKinsey Quarterly

Companies that address their organizational weaknesses as they implement growth strategies give themselves an advantage.

Most senior managers pay close attention to the strategic side of growth—the “wheres,” “whens,” and
“hows.” Yet many underestimate the importance of organizational factors in translating a growth strategy into reality. This oversight can dampen a company’s growth plans: organizational processes and
structures that are well suited to today’s challenges may well buckle under the strain of new demands or
make it impossible to meet them. Likewise, key employees may lack the skills needed to cope with the additional complexity that growth brings. By reviewing the experiences of three organizations that faced the stresses imposed by new growth initiatives, this article seeks to illustrate such “pain points” and
suggests some approaches for coping with them.

Click here to read the article in full.

See how the Management Innovation Index supports and assists the premise of this article

Practically Radical: Four Simple Truths about Leading Change and Making a Difference - William C. Taylor

“We are living through the age of disruption. You can’t do big things if you’re content with doing things a little better than everyone else or a little differently than how you did them before. In an era of hyper-competition and non-stop dislocation, the only way to stand out from the crowd is to stand for something special. Today, the most successful organizations don’t just out-compete their rivals. They redefine the terms of competition by embracing one-of-a-kind ideas in a world filled with me-too thinking.”

Read William's full manifesto here courtesy of Change This.

About William C. Taylor | William C. Taylor is an agenda-setting writer, speaker, and entrepreneur who has shaped the global conversation about the best ways to compete, innovate, and succeed. He is the cofounder of Fast Company, which published its premiere issue 15 years ago, and the coauthor of Mavericks at Work, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. His new project, Practically Radical, is the latest chapter in a two-decade career devoted to challenging conventional wisdom in business and helping business leaders win. Practically Radical was published on January 4, 2011 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. Bill blogs about the book at practicallyradical.com. A graduate of Princeton University and the MIT Sloan School of Management, he lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with his wife and two daughters.

The change-capable organization and the importance of metrics - accenture

One of the odd paradoxes of organizational change is that all the initiatives companies undertake to support major transformations—learning programs, structural changes, communications plans and the like—can actually prevent effective change as much as enable it. The enemy is time. It may take months to bring a team on board to design and execute a change program, then several more months to make the transition to a new way of working. By that time, who can be sure the initiative is even relevant to the real business issues of the day? Maybe, instead, the change program ends up being more like last year’s fashions—handsome and well crafted, but out of date.

Click to read more ...